gothic lemon dna

rose // 26 // they/elle // MINORS DNI

[cowboy-garfield]

Everybody go tf home I have officially found a worse name for eyes than ‘orbs’

[pancakeke]

can’t believe I had to read this with my own balls

[toofumandag1rl]

Lil comic with Orange meeting pink and more doodles of them

[wanderingcas]

can we all hold hands and agree not to call fanworks content. can we all kiss each other's foreheads and agree not to call it "promoting your content". i beg of you i am not a cog in the machine i am not doing this for profit i am not an influencer im just engaging in a hobby helppppp

[communistkenobi]

I had a lot of/still have some vestigial arrogance about quantitative methods over qualitative ones, probably in a combination of scientific misogyny + STEMlord superiority. But doing regression analysis and quant-heavy data analysis makes me realise more and more that you can justify basically any claim with numbers, and that you can construct your research in such a way as to output the numbers you want. which does not mean that all data are made up or that quantitative knowledge is all false. I think stories about scientists straight up inventing numbers or fudging experiments on purpose prove that there is a real difference between fraudulent and non-fraudulent research. but those data must always be narrativised & are always already narrativised. The act of presenting numbers itself is doing some of that narration because you’re already arguing that these numbers are worth presenting

[communistkenobi]

People in the notes are rightfully pointing out common issues with data manipulation and pre-loaded conclusions in scientific research (i.e., the academic version of asking "so, how often do you beat your wife?" and so on), but I should have clarified that I'm not really talking about that. I'm talking about completely legitimate, above-board scientific research.

For example, I've had students ask me (in good faith) how it was possible for international medical bodies to report different counts of COVID-19 cases during the early years of the pandemic. And one of the answers is that you need to first define what you mean by a "COVID-19 case." Do you include self-reported incidences? Waste water data? Geo-fenced social media posts about people complaining about their coronavirus symptoms? Federal estimates? Hospital data? How do you compare countries/territories/substate entities with mandatory reporting mechanisms vs countries/territories/substate entities that rely only on voluntary self-reported cases? And what combination of these do you use? How you construct what you mean by "case" is going to impact the outcomes you report. These different counts of COVID-19 cases can all be true simultaneously, not because numbers are made up, but because they all come out of different methodologies that can be equally valid.

And this is true across all science, not just social science. Bill Clinton said it best lol: "it depends on what your definition of the word 'is' is." This feels obvious when you look at scientific research that uses "skull measurements" as their object of analysis - the concept itself is white supremacist, regardless of how "sound" the research is. But even something as apparently self-evident as a COVID-19 case still requires a definition, and how you define your variables is necessarily going to impact how the research goes and what conclusions are drawn.

These definitions are always embedded in political & social assumptions. And again, this does not mean that science is all made up or nonsense or whatever. There is a widespread fetishism of "objective knowledge" that is itself ideological - the idea that knowledge can be divorced from all historical and political contexts, that you can scrub bias from research and simply report the facts. Valuable, well-supported, well-constructed scientific research is always embedded in these contexts. Not just as a result of researcher assumptions, but of the material context it exists in - what research resources are available, how & what research gets funded, the academy's relationship to the state & non-government bodies that both provide data and use that research to inform policy, the historical relationships universities often have with settler-colonialism and imperialism that give them access to "foreign" research subjects, etc etc etc.

So my overall point (which I didn't communicate well) is that data can always say what you want to some extent, for good and for ill. And research results (at least in my experience) tend to surprise you in ways that require explanations, which themselves can be fully justified, but again, exist within many different contexts that influence how you interpret them - and not just the results themselves, but your own surprise at your results

[officialspec]

the cage

[cumaeansibyl]

Any story which refers to Haiti as an impoverished nation, which is all of them, should also mention that when Haitians won their independence from France, French gunships showed up and demanded they pay something like 22 billion dollars in today's money to compensate France for the stolen land and enslaved people they could no longer exploit

It took Haiti over a hundred years to pay that ransom and it's difficult to explain just how badly that fucked up their entire development, especially since France also demanded a 50% discount on everything they bought from Haiti just to make it harder. Like! No wonder they're impoverished!

Anyway if France would like to assist Haiti in its current difficulties they could always pay back the fucking money they extorted

[quasi-normalcy]

I think there's probably a moral element to doomerism where it's not just that they think that society is doomed, they think that it deserves to be doomed for its decadent and sinful ways, and they don't like the idea that it might somehow escape justice.

[valkayrieactual]

[mangled-by-disuse]

people have this tendency to view the wheel as a benchmark of human development.

and i feel like people forget just how many parts of the world didn't use wheels consistently until the last couple of centuries

like. not because they were "primitive" or hadn't thought to invent it, but because there are terrains and regions where wheels just aren't useful. in deserts. on islands. in places with a lot of bog or heavy snowfall.

in the upper pennines, wheeled carts only came into common use when the coal industry grew in the 18th century and the gravity train was developed. until then, roads were too hard to maintain and most people just used horses, mules, or sleds for heavy transport.

in argyll and the west of scotland, where mountain terrain hits the coast and where the lochs mean that there is a lot of coast, it is much easier to use boats and rafts than to try to transport freight overland. so small freight was similarly carried by livestock or dragged, and only as far as the nearest body of water.

in the southern fens (before they were drained) rafts were more common than carts, usually being dragged over mud and bog rather than floating in deep water.

and it is relevant to note that all of these were in England and Scotland, places which had, on aggregate, been using wheels since the neolithic. none of these places failed to invent the wheel. they just uninvented it. because it was useless. other cultures in broader terrain areas (like the steppes, or the deserts, or the Arctic) may never have invented the wheel at all, bc, like, why would you? it's useless.

and. idk. i think about that a lot when people talk about progress and universal human development. it puts me in mind of a book from the 1860s i read that was like "and those backwards people in subsaharan africa haven't even thought to invent doors! on an unrelated note all the houses we, the Enlightened Whites, build in the area are unbearably hot and full of flies. wonder what that's about." like. wow. you really are just of the belief that the ideal technological development looks the same wherever you are, huh?

[elfwreck]

The wheel is invented by most human cultures.

They used it for pottery. They used it for children's toys. They used it for spinning thread. They used it to turn a spit while cooking. They attached it to a box with handles and used it to carry supplies to and from the battlefield. They stuck it in water and used it to power a mill. They made it out of rock and spun it to sharpen blades. They made them tiny and put them on necklaces.

The wheel's a very useful device and it got invented for a thousand purposes, some common to many cultures, some limited to just a few.

They didn't use it for transport until they they had roads.

And a lot of terrain does not take well to roads, not without a whole lot of time and money being spent by someone other than local farmers. You need a whole lot of people using the exact same route, over and over, to justify the hassle and expense of building & maintaining a road that's faster to navigate with wheels than by either loading your stuff on a string of donkeys, or dragging it behind them on a blanket stretched between two poles.

They didn't "fail to invent the wheel"; they failed to invent the ox-drawn cart. Because they had nowhere to use it.

[hotvampireadjacent]

[extrathicccarlwheezer]

the gif is even funnier

[paulandersonxo]

(cant remember the expression "bit off more than i could chew") guess i really sucked off more than i could swallow huh

[iphigeniacomplex]

taylor swift is a tyrant for real like value neutral judgement but you can tell in her music the specific point that caligula started visiting her in dreams

[iphigeniacomplex]

she has this 3d-printed mini desk recreation of the bust of caligula with whom she communicates daily and in order to evade football’s suspicions she told him it was jesus and he was like Niiice jesus is actually awesomesauce ❤️ Like jesus helps you with touchdowns🏈🔥 and she was like yess exactly and then asked caligula in perfect latin if he could connect her with the ghost of genghis khan so they can talk strategy

[albertserra]

The Sameer Project just posted on their Instagram that they’re having to severely pause/cut back their operations due to dwindling funding. Please considering giving and signing up to be a monthly donor

[kindredspiritsandgoodomens]

Here is the link to their page.

[molabuddy]

lets all be friends..!!!!!

[kaylmao]

idk i would personally rather give up access to certain products seasonally or locally than have people enslaved to give me the ability to have any product any place any time. i think i can go without tomatoes in january.

[kaylmao]

i truly do think that most people if confronted with it and pressed on it would agree. but it's comfortable to gain privileges from someone else's suffering, especially if you don't have to see that suffering directly.

[biby-24k]

made this edit with katara's original nose

[pitbolshevik]

i think we should normalize calling Trump supporters pedo lovers tbh

[pitbolshevik]

they spend so much time smearing lgbt people (especially transfems) as child groomers only to vote for possibly the most powerful child rapist alive and i don't think we should ever let anyone forget that